Business

Report: Tablets to Outship Desktops This Year

Tablet PCs will outship desktop PCs for the first time this year, catapulting us into a true "post-PC era," according to a report by researcher IDC.

Shipments of tablet PCs will surpass desktops as the former category grows by 48.7% and the latter shrinks by 4.3%, IDC estimates. In 2014, tablets will also outship portable PCs. "In emerging markets, consumer spending typically starts with mobile phones and, in many cases, moves to tablets before PCs," said Megha Saini, research analyst for IDC's Worldwide Smart Connected Device Tracker, in a statement. "The pressure on the PC market is significantly increasing and we can see longer replacement cycles coming into effect very soon and that, too, will put downward pressure on PC sales."

Meanwhile, "smart connected devices," a category that includes smarthphones, tablets and PCs, grew 29.1% vs. 2012 to more than 1 billion devices. The value of those shipments, according to IDC was $576.9 billion. The researcher predicts that by 2017 the segment will hit 2.2 billion units with revenues of $814.3 billion.

Looking at the fourth quarter, IDC also found that Apple had 20.3% of the smart connected devices market vs. 21.2% for Samsung. Apple had 30.7% of revenues for the segment compared to 20.4% for Samsung, according to IDC.

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